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STORIES
BY LOU KILZER
Stuck in Samoa
Life in the Teen Help camps is highly regimented.
A pecking order puts each teen in one of six status categories, or levels. New arrivals begin in Level 1, stripped of almost all personal freedoms. Staff members or other teens shadow them around the clock.
As teens attend group encounter sessions and embrace prescribed behavior patterns, they move to higher levels that offer more freedoms. If they really get with the program, they reach Level 6 and can become junior staff members.
But if the teens resist, they can remain in Level 1.
Many parents swear by the unflinching Teen Help code, certain it saved their children from self-destruction. Other parents have grown disenchanted, convinced the program stripped their teens of their individuality and was tantamount to abuse and brainwashing.
"If brainwashing makes you clean up your life and live well after that, what's wrong with that?" Laura Murphy asks.
Psychologist Margaret Singer, professor emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley, says that Teen Help practices "large group awareness training," a technique designed to turn an individual into an instrument of a larger group.
In an interview last year with the Denver Rocky Mountain News, Singer said that not everyone is capable of coping with the tactics and that some will suffer psychological damage.
Teen Help denies the allegations.
A notebook written by Corey Murphy was found in one of the isolation cells at Le Tiera, says Barbe Stamps, a crusader against behavior modification camps who visited the facility in October. By then, Le Tiera had been abandoned. The notebooks littered the floors of the cells.
Corey never got past Level 3 in Paradise Cove. Laura says that once he got there, he gradually regressed to Levels 1 and 2.
Teen Help discourages parental visits until teens reach the upper levels. Laura did not visit Samoa to see her son.
But Laura says the lack of freedom and family contact didn't bother her son.
"Corey was very happy in the program," she says. "It was the best place for him. He was happy the whole time."
Laura says proof that Corey was happy and well-adjusted at Paradise Cove can be seen from letters he sent home saying he loved being there.
Paul Richards, a Washington boy who was at Paradise Cove with Corey, scoffed at this. He says that if a teen didn't write positive letters about the program, he couldn't advance to a higher level. Richards says Paradise Cove's staff reviewed all letters.
Richards recalls Corey's trying to show a winning attitude.
"He was a bright kid with a really young face," Richards says. "He always had this kind of cherry smile on his face."
Writing of her decision to send Corey to Western Samoa, Laura says: "I had no intention of sending him to Easy Street. He had earned some serious lessons. And he got them."
Desperate Measures: Home
| Epilogue: Lost Boy
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